While many PC makers introduce new or tweaked laptop designs just about every year, Apple tends to stick with the same design for a few years before changing everything all at once to reflect changes in internal hardware (the move from HDDs to SSDs, for example) and evolving design tastes (the move across the lineup to aluminum unibody chassis). 2013's MacBook Air retains the same basic design that the laptops have used since their late-2010 rebirth, when Apple refined the design of the existing 13-inch Air and introduced the 11-inch model.

Set the brand-new Airs on a table next to last year's models and it's unlikely anyone could tell the difference. Even changes to the speeds of the I/O ports, like what happened in 2011 with the addition of Thunderbolt and in 2012 with the addition of USB 3.0, aren't here to convince would-be upgraders. Everything that's new about the 2013 Air is hidden away inside the laptop. While no one thing will convince 2011 or 2012 Air users to upgrade, the year-to-year improvements are still impressive when taken as a whole.

For the bulk of this review, we'll be comparing the entry-level 13-inch 2013 MacBook Air to the equivalent 2012 MacBook Air. Both laptops' 4GB of RAM have been upgraded to 8GB of RAM—$100 is a bit steep for this sort of upgrade, but since the MacBook Air's RAM is soldered to the motherboard, this is an upgrade most of you will probably want to make. The 11-inch MacBook Air shares all of the same internal specs as the 13-inch model (with the exception of the battery), so most of the observations here will also apply to the smaller model.

This also serves as our first hands-on look at Intel's new Haswell CPUs, the new integrated Intel HD 5000 GPU, and 802.11ac (aka Gigabit Wi-Fi), so it will be a bit more benchmark-heavy than some of our other laptop reviews. We'll leave no stone unturned, because many of the upgraded technologies in this year's Air will be making it out to most other Ultrabooks as the year rolls on.

Body and build quality; ports and screen

The short version: There's nothing to see here. Everything is the same as last year except for the dual-mic pinholes on the laptop's left side. They are of dubious benefit to audio and dictation quality.

The long version: As we said, there's not much to distinguish the shell of the 2013 Air from previous models. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It still has the same tapered aluminum chassis, the same 0.68-inch thickness (at the back, which is the thickest point), and the same 2.96 pounds (2.38 pounds for the 11-inch model) as last year. The sole physical change to last year's model is the two pinholes on the laptop's left-hand side to accommodate the dual microphones.

These two microphones are supposed to reduce noise compared to the single-mic setup in previous models, and to test this out we did the same thing we did when we reviewed the 2012 iMac: we set the new model and the old model side-by-side and talked to them. First, we recorded some audio in Audacity to check volume and noise levels, and then we used OS X 10.8's dictation feature to read this paragraph aloud and turn it into text (note that we didn't read any punctuation aloud as we dictated to the computers).

The results aren't quite as drastic as they were in the 2012 iMac. The audio recording on the 2013 model was, in general, a bit quieter than the 2012 model. You could hear less background noise, but my voice also wasn't as loud. Both had fairly significant issues with dictation using the built-in microphone, indenting twice when they shouldn't have and just generally misinterpreting words. The 2013 may have been slightly more accurate, but it still misses a whole bunch. You'll still want a good headset for talking to your Mac.

The port selection and layout are the same as last year: MagSafe 2, one USB 3.0 port, and a headphone jack on the left; one USB 3.0 port and one Thunderbolt port on the right (plus an SD card slot with the 13-inch model).

The screens are also the same as in previous models—the 11.6-inch model has a 1366×768 (136 PPI) display, while the 13.3-inch has a 1440×900 (128 PPI) display. Those hoping for Retina displays in this year's Airs will be disappointed by this refresh. While Haswell's battery life and graphics improvements would likely make a Retina screen possible in this form factor (competitors like Toshiba are already fitting high-res screens into similar products), Apple instead opted to keep the display (and chassis) the same to pump up battery life and graphics performance at the panel's native resolution.

Enlarge/ You can still see all of those pixels when you get close enough.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The keyboard and trackpad are still the gold standard for thin-and-light notebooks.

Andrew Cunningham

The screen's quality is still pretty good. Colors are bright and horizontal viewing angles are acceptable, but vertical viewing angles aren't fantastic. The colors shift if you view the screen from above. The display isn't bad, and I certainly notice "Retina"-level pixel densities more on small screens like phones and tablets than I do in laptops. Still, it's worth noting that some of the PC makers are shipping Ultrabooks in this price bracket with higher resolution IPS panels with better viewing angles.

Another potential sticking point for some buyers may be the Air's continued lack of a touchscreen. However, Apple's desktop operating system is not exactly finger-friendly, so there wouldn't be much of a point unless you intend to buy the Air just to run Windows 8 on it. For its part, Apple seems content to let the large, accurate multitouch trackpad handle all of the gesture support in OS X. It works just as well as ever.

Even the laptop's heat and fan noise is mostly unchanged from the prior year's model. The MacBook Air's fan is normally near-silent, but it can ramp up to a dull whine when the laptop is under load. The laptop really only gets hot when it's under heavy load, and then it's mostly in the corner near the MagSafe 2 connector (around where the CPU is located on the logic board).

182 Reader Comments

My first impression after hearing about the battery life was 'Do want!'

I am in the market for a new laptop in the next coming months and have considered jumping the fence over to the Apple side of life.

I wonder how battery life will change for those gorgeous Retina MacBooPros though. As well as what the performance of the Intel graphics chip would be and how close it gets to a dedicated card. All that extra horsepower does sound quite appealing.

I say this as someone who has and does own a large amount of tech from different companies up and down the tech company spectrum and I say without a shadow of a doubt, my Core2Duo MacBook Air (2nd gen) is the best laptop I've ever owned.

My first impression after hearing about the battery life was 'Do want!'

I am in the market for a new laptop in the next coming months and have considered jumping the fence over to the Apple side of life.

I wonder how battery life will change for those gorgeous Retina MacBooPros though. As well as what the performance of the Intel graphics chip would be and how close it gets to a dedicated card. All that extra horsepower does sound quite appealing.

There are some tough decisions that will need to be made.

That "gorgeous" Retina MacBook Pro has a much bigger battery and it lasts half as long. Video performance on the retina MBP is probably worse than the MBA, because the dedicated video card's better performance is not good enough to compensate for the 4x increase in pixel count.

My tip would be to get the MacBook Air for 99% of people. Also, be sure to upgrade the RAM to 8GB.

Well reviewed. It's good to read a review of a Mac product that appears to be honest about the good and bad points, rather than just over the top fawning (I'm looking at you verge).

In terms of the product - I'm glad they focused on battery life, rather than just making the thing even thinner and lighter, but would have preferred a 1200p or greater screen. I guess they are trying to segment this as firmly a non-pro model - best for browsing etc - against the Macbook Pro which is aimed at professionals and people doing real work.

EDIT: Downvotes? Do people really think this isn't a fair review, or are people disagreeing with me about the MBA/MBP segmentation?

There are some tough decisions that will need to be made.That "gorgeous" Retina MacBook Pro has a much bigger battery and it lasts half as long. Video performance on the retina MBP is probably worse than the MBA, because the dedicated video card's better performance is not good enough to compensate for the 4x increase in pixel count.

I don't think that's quite right, unless you also watch or manipulate videos which have 4x the resolution – quite unlikely given that most videos are either 720p or 1080p. Scaling surely consumes some extra juice, but I don't think it's significant (and besides there is still some scaling to do in both cases for a 1440*900 screen anyway).

I don't think that's quite right, unless you also watch or manipulate videos which have 4x the resolution – quite unlikely given that most videos are either 720p or 1080p. Scaling surely consumes some extra juice, but I don't think it's significant (and besides there is still some scaling to do in both cases for a 1440*900 screen anyway).

Videos should play perfectly on both machines. Even the 'air can drive a 30" external display without issues.

The graphics pain will be felt when you're gaming or just doing basic stuff like browsing the web (especially websites with a lot of flash). OS X 10.9 might improve things a lot however.

we used OS X 10.8's dictation feature to read this paragraph aloud and turn it into text

Wait, so you used the Mac's built in text-to-speech looped back into the speech-to-text system? Where was the audio coming from? Surely they would cancel any audio coming out of their own speakers to the best of their ability, strongly inhibiting interpretation, and more importantly, a computer generated voice is uniquely inhuman. The wave patterns would not likely match anything in the built-in database very well. Voice interpretation through software is not done in the same way that humans do it.

Maybe testing it with an actual human voice speaking to both MBAs at the same time would have been better?

Perhaps I completely misunderstood what was actually tested and it was a human speaking. The dictation software is far from perfect, but I've had much better success with it than is demonstrated here.

My first impression after hearing about the battery life was 'Do want!'

I am in the market for a new laptop in the next coming months and have considered jumping the fence over to the Apple side of life.

I wonder how battery life will change for those gorgeous Retina MacBooPros though. As well as what the performance of the Intel graphics chip would be and how close it gets to a dedicated card. All that extra horsepower does sound quite appealing.

There are some tough decisions that will need to be made.

That "gorgeous" Retina MacBook Pro has a much bigger battery and it lasts half as long. Video performance on the retina MBP is probably worse than the MBA, because the dedicated video card's better performance is not good enough to compensate for the 4x increase in pixel count.

My tip would be to get the MacBook Air for 99% of people. Also, be sure to upgrade the RAM to 8GB.

I was under the impression the MBPrs havent been refreshed yet? It sounds like they wouldn't benefit as much from Haswell since these laptops tend to do more constant heavy lifting than their Air counterparts.

I don't think that's quite right, unless you also watch or manipulate videos which have 4x the resolution – quite unlikely given that most videos are either 720p or 1080p. Scaling surely consumes some extra juice, but I don't think it's significant (and besides there is still some scaling to do in both cases for a 1440*900 screen anyway).

Videos should play perfectly on both machines. Even the 'air can drive a 30" external display without issues.

The graphics pain will be felt when you're gaming or just doing basic stuff like browsing the web (especially websites with a lot of flash). OS X 10.9 might improve things a lot however.

If you're gaming you could just lower the resolution and have more fluid play on the MBP compared to the Air.

I don't think that's quite right, unless you also watch or manipulate videos which have 4x the resolution – quite unlikely given that most videos are either 720p or 1080p. Scaling surely consumes some extra juice, but I don't think it's significant (and besides there is still some scaling to do in both cases for a 1440*900 screen anyway).

Videos should play perfectly on both machines. Even the 'air can drive a 30" external display without issues.

The graphics pain will be felt when you're gaming or just doing basic stuff like browsing the web (especially websites with a lot of flash). OS X 10.9 might improve things a lot however.

sorry, I thought "video performance" meant "performance with videos", not "general graphic performance". The latter is not an issue either anyway, if the videogame does not run well enough at 2880*1800 (or 2560*1600), you can always run it at 1440*900 (or 1280*800), it will still look as good or better than how it would on the Air, and you will enjoy the better performances of the MBpro graphic chip.Web pages with a lot of flash may have some issue, maybe, but that is not a scenario where performance is critical anyway. As long as it is viewable it is ok, and it certainly is on the retina MBpro.

That battery life is pretty impressive, although objectively it's merely on par with a Vaio Z + sheet battery (which is vastly more powerful than the MBA).

They really should have gone for a higher-PPI display though.

Vastly more powerful? Not as far as I'm aware, and it would also be thicker, heavier, and running Windows. Plenty of disadvantages for anyone interested in a Unix-like system. And unless the Vaio Z has a haswell update I haven't seen, then the battery still wouldn't likely last as long. There's always a bigger laptop, but that doesn't mean their performance is directly comparable.

I'm curious as for how battery life is under Windows. I know that Macs running Windows have worse battery life, but I want to know how large that gap is.

If it's good enough, I might consider getting one of these to replace an old Thinkpad.

Just run Windows on top of Mac in a Parallels VM. It's good enough that you can't even notice a difference performance-wise when playing games versus doing it on a native copy of Windows, and the integration is tight enough that you can double click a spreadsheet and have it open in the Windows copy of Microsoft Office. All of the benefits of Mac and the few benefits of Windows combined into one seamless package.

Also of note is just how energy efficient it is through a combination of Intel's VT extensions and autopausing the VM whenever it isn't being used. It, of course, automatically unpauses it whenever you need Windows to do something -- to the point that you won't even notice the machine was ever paused.

we used OS X 10.8's dictation feature to read this paragraph aloud and turn it into text

Wait, so you used the Mac's built in text-to-speech looped back into the speech-to-text system? Where was the audio coming from? Surely they would cancel any audio coming out of their own speakers to the best of their ability, strongly inhibiting interpretation, and more importantly, a computer generated voice is uniquely inhuman. The wave patterns would not likely match anything in the built-in database very well. Voice interpretation through software is not done in the same way that humans do it.

Maybe testing it with an actual human voice speaking to both MBAs at the same time would have been better?

Perhaps I completely misunderstood what was actually tested and it was a human speaking. The dictation software is far from perfect, but I've had much better success with it than is demonstrated here.

Sorry, that's unclear - I spoke to both of the Macs, using the Dictation feature to turn my voice into text.

Well reviewed. It's good to read a review of a Mac product that appears to be honest about the good and bad points, rather than just over the top fawning (I'm looking at you verge).

In terms of the product - I'm glad they focused on battery life, rather than just making the thing even thinner and lighter, but would have preferred a 1200p or greater screen. I guess they are trying to segment this as firmly a non-pro model - best for browsing etc - against the Macbook Pro which is aimed at professionals and people doing real work.

EDIT: Downvotes? Do people really think this isn't a fair review, or are people disagreeing with me about the MBA/MBP segmentation?

To answer your questions in order, Yes, no, and yes. We're downvoting you because you're implying that the Macbook Air is being firmly segmented towards Facebook. The Macbook Air is a very capable machine, and I know many people who use them for real work. The Macbook Pros are only marginally better at CPU performance and tremendously worse in every other capacity, unless you pay up for a Retina Macbook Pro. What you said is patently false.

> Plenty of disadvantages for anyone interested in a Unix-like system.

You do realize that you can run Linux on a Vaio Pro, don't you?

Yes, but I'm still paying for a license of Windows, and I would feel bad enough about throwing away money that I wouldn't fully delete that copy of Windows. I imagine many people are similar. That's then just space wasting away on the disk, and I'd also be supporting Microsoft's decision to sell Windows. Office, Xbox, and Visual Studio are excellent products in their own right, but I do not like supporting Windows itself.

I'm curious as for how battery life is under Windows. I know that Macs running Windows have worse battery life, but I want to know how large that gap is.

If it's good enough, I might consider getting one of these to replace an old Thinkpad.

Just run Windows on top of Mac in a Parallels VM. It's good enough that you can't even notice a difference playing games versus doing it on a native copy of Windows, and the integration is tight enough that you can double click a spreadsheet and have it open in the Windows copy of Microsoft Office. All of the benefits of Mac and the few benefits of Windows combined into one seamless package.

Not many things kill battery life faster than running a Virtual Machine.

I'm curious as for how battery life is under Windows. I know that Macs running Windows have worse battery life, but I want to know how large that gap is.

If it's good enough, I might consider getting one of these to replace an old Thinkpad.

Just run Windows on top of Mac in a Parallels VM. It's good enough that you can't even notice a difference playing games versus doing it on a native copy of Windows, and the integration is tight enough that you can double click a spreadsheet and have it open in the Windows copy of Microsoft Office. All of the benefits of Mac and the few benefits of Windows combined into one seamless package.

Not many things kill battery life faster than running a Virtual Machine.

Except in this case. Parallels pauses the VM whenever possible to preserve battery life, and just does a good job in general of power management. With Intel's virtualization extensions, virtualization is very efficient to begin with anyways.

Each and every Windows ultrabook in this price bracket has an IPS display, but Apple, who basically introduced the IPS hype on the mainstream market with the iPhone, still builds a TN panel into the 4th generation of their most mobile laptop. I just don't get that.

There are some tough decisions that will need to be made.That "gorgeous" Retina MacBook Pro has a much bigger battery and it lasts half as long. Video performance on the retina MBP is probably worse than the MBA, because the dedicated video card's better performance is not good enough to compensate for the 4x increase in pixel count.

I don't think that's quite right, unless you also watch or manipulate videos which have 4x the resolution – quite unlikely given that most videos are either 720p or 1080p. Scaling surely consumes some extra juice, but I don't think it's significant (and besides there is still some scaling to do in both cases for a 1440*900 screen anyway).

I know it's hard to understand but computers can be used for something other than watching videos and posting on twitter/FB/whatever is the new hipster thing to do.

Other than that real nice to see that at least Apple stopped with the stupid race to paper thin. More battery life is far more valuable than losing a mm of thickness.

Not really. The OEM cost of a license is roughly the same as the money the vendor recoups by putting (uninstallable) bloatware on there. Just wipe Windows if you don't want it, and don't feel bad. I've found that it usually works to just install Windows in a VM using the product key you got with the machine - and you can even put that VM on an external drive when you don't need it. If enough people start putting Linux on their Windows machines, then the industry will get the message.

Not really. The OEM cost of a license is roughly the same as the money the vendor recoups by putting (uninstallable) bloatware on there. Just wipe Windows if you don't want it, and don't feel bad. I've found that it usually works to just install Windows in a VM using the product key you got with the machine - and you can even put that VM on an external drive when you don't need it. If enough people start putting Linux on their Windows machines, then the industry will get the message.

Perhaps, but Microsoft is still getting money for that license regardless.

System76 sells quality Linux laptops for people who want it, and Dell offers Sputnik. There are options, but even so, Linux taking off in a dying market doesn't seem very useful or beneficial. Sales figures strongly indicate that tablets and smartphones are taking customer interest exclusively. Businesses still buy desktops and laptops in large quantity, but the customer desktop is already dead, and laptops are struggling to remain relevant to the average customer. Apple is the only OEM who has maintained decent profitability off of selling computers, last I checked, and the others are suffering.

The real excitement will start when Ubuntu touch is fully converged in April of next year.

> The Macbook Air is a very capable machine, and I know many people who use them for real work. The Macbook Pros are only marginally better at CPU performance and tremendously worse in every other capacity, unless you pay up for a Retina Macbook Pro. What you said is patently false.

So what you're trying to say is that you think Apple are doing a terrible job at segmentation? Your thesis is that the MBP is worse in almost every respect than an Air - do you really think Apple are dumb enough to sell a product that is both more expensive and clearly worse than another product?

I don't think that you are right that MBP is no better for high end use than MBA - I have found MBAs to be far more laggy when using programs like Photoshop, and running large number of applications. Even just changing workspaces on an Ivy Bridge Air is significantly less fluid than MBP in my experience.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that buying a Vaio or Thinkpad is a bad idea.

> Linux taking off in a dying market doesn't seem very useful or beneficial.

Absolute rubbish. The low end of the market is dying off, but the premium end of the laptop market has never been healthier. The sort of people who bought $400 machines now buy tablets (and maybe keep around an old or second hand laptop), but the people buying $1000 still keep upgrading to new laptops.

> The Macbook Air is a very capable machine, and I know many people who use them for real work. The Macbook Pros are only marginally better at CPU performance and tremendously worse in every other capacity, unless you pay up for a Retina Macbook Pro. What you said is patently false.

So what you're trying to say is that you think Apple are doing a terrible job at segmentation? Your thesis is that the MBP is worse in almost every respect than an Air - do you really think Apple are dumb enough to sell a product that is both more expensive and clearly worse than another product?

I don't think that you are right that MBP is no better for high end use than MBA - I have found MBAs to be far more laggy when using programs like Photoshop, and running large number of applications. Even just changing workspaces on an Ivy Bridge Air is significantly less fluid than MBP in my experience.

Your anecdote has been taken into account, but no, that's not true. The Ivy MBA can run workspace switching at full framerates while doing a dozen other tasks, and the SSD makes it far faster and more responsive for every task involving disk I/O. The GPU is just as powerful as the MBP's GPU, and workspace switching is done on the GPU, so your assertion *must* be wrong, unless we take into account the fact that the MBA actually has a better display than the MBP. In which case, it might have to work an additional 5% harder to render workspace switching, but even that won't make it struggle. Apple has done a poor job of segmentation in this case. They're quickly course correcting to fix the issue, as evidenced by the Retina MBPs and the fact that the MBA still hasn't received a retina display.

The normal MBP has a slightly higher max-CPU clock speed, but it has much slower disk I/O, a lower res screen, shorter battery life, a thicker chassis, and a higher price. Tell me again how much better it is, please.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that buying a Vaio or Thinkpad is a bad idea.

> Linux taking off in a dying market doesn't seem very useful or beneficial.

Absolute rubbish. The low end of the market is dying off, but the premium end of the laptop market has never been healthier. The sort of people who bought $400 machines now buy tablets (and maybe keep around an old or second hand laptop), but the people buying $1000 still keep upgrading to new laptops.

No, sales figures indicate that there has been only a modest dip in laptops, and that hundreds of millions of them are still being sold.

A lot of people still need laptops and desktops for a lot of what they do - coding, design, writing long text - and desktop Linux is as important now as it has ever been.

I used desktop Linux exclusively for about the last four years, until a few weeks ago when I bought a Mac mini desktop. I now use Mac and Linux together. I understand how important desktop Linux is, but the average customer doesn't.

Just out of interest - everyone here says to get 8GB ram. But do you really ever use that much?

I usually run all the usual programmers tools, browsers, editors, chats, skypes, whatnot and even have 2x 512Mb linux virtuals running for development, together with Libreoffice for documentation while all this... and I've at worst hit barely 3GB mark for used ram. I also _do_ occasional image editing (and especially web graphs) with tens of images open in GIMP.

Just how on earth you can actually use more than 4GB ram? Apart from few very specialized tasks, perhaps editing gigabyte videos, which you don't do on laptop anyway, I just can't figure out how to waste my ram! Getting 8GB to my desktop was the worst waste of money so far - it has never hit past the 4GB mark.

> They're quickly course correcting to fix the issue, as evidenced by the Retina MBPs and the fact that the MBA still hasn't received a retina display.

So basically you are agreeing with me - it's just that you are caught up in the detail of me saying MBP rather than rMBP (I originally meant both models, not specifically the non-retina version).

Also you are talking in very theoretical terms, and getting some of the details wrong (for instance, you can buy a MBP with an SSD). Have you actually used both of these models, or are you just insisting that I must be wrong for purely technical reasons?

> They're quickly course correcting to fix the issue, as evidenced by the Retina MBPs and the fact that the MBA still hasn't received a retina display.

So basically you are agreeing with me - it's just that you are caught up in the detail of me saying MBP rather than rMBP (I originally meant both models, not specifically the non-retina version).

Also you are talking in very theoretical terms, and getting some of the details wrong (for instance, you can buy a MBP with an SSD). Have you actually used both of these models, or are you just insisting that I must be wrong for purely technical reasons?

Buying an MBP with an SSD would be far, far more expensive than an MBA with SSD and you still lose out on features like Power Nap while you gain nothing in terms of screen res or battery life or portability. The rMBP is a very separate class of computer, and right now, the 13 inchers lag like nobody's business, so I knew you weren't talking about them performing smoothly. The MBP itself is a terrible choice, and even the 13" rMBP has the same GPU as the MBA, so it could not perform better. There is no way. The 15" is a larger computer, which takes it out of competition with the MBA, and it costs hundreds of dollars more. But, I know people who do engineering on an MBA, and people who edit vast quantities of DSLR photos on an MBA. They are better than anything but an rMBP, and those aren't in the same price range.

EDIT: and yes, I have used all of these models. I live ten minutes from an Apple store, I go there all the time because I enjoy exploring all of the different models and always having the most up to date information. It would be impractical to purchase all of them, but that doesn't mean I have to be ignorant of them.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.